I need my Civ Fix :(

Major_Heartfire said:

Hmm. That is odd. You're sure Civ is the only game it happens on? Have you played the others for extended periods?? Besides the basic reinstall and verify integrity, I really wouldn't know how to solve this. Uninstall every mod you have, try running in DX9 and DX11, see if either makes a difference..

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Windows XP (I know, I know. I plan to get a massive upgrade before the year ends), so no DX 11 for me.

Take note that this happens even if the very first thing I do after turning my computer on is to play the game. Also, my computer has experienced being on for more than 12 hours, in the summer (37 degree Celsius and above days!) with more than 4/5 of that time devoted to playing.

snarzberry said:

Could be dust build up causing overheating, open her up and give her a clean. /suggestion.

Click to expand...

Will do. Although, I now play with the side panel of my CPU open (as I had been doing since last march, ever since I replaced my Motherboard for busted caps).

So how do I clean it then? Compressed air?

That'll work

You should also continue to do it regularly! Really helps the system

OK, so I've been reading a civ 4 LP in lparchive and it looks like the game will be more complex. However, I'm of the firm belief that complex does not necessarily mean better. We'll see when (and if) I actually get to play this weekend.

EDIT:
Also, ROADS. ROADS EVERYWHERE. ROADS LIKE WORMS. ROADS LIKE SNAKES.

Ok, opening with Civ 4, playing on Noble difficulty.

Grasping at straws. It's like the game is too cerebral for me. But hey it was like this when I first started with Civ 5. Looks like I have to get used to the square grid and new terrain graphics. Looks like I also need to know some more about the tech tree (having to research first before I can build farms was a big WUT? moment for me). Over all I think Civ 5 is easier to get into and get the hang of (I can hear zOMG DUMBED DOWN!!! cries from the Civ 4 Master Race from a mile away).

Also, imagine my surprise when my new city wanted to become part of the empire of another civ. I also need to train my eye on how to spot for new potential city spots. Settled on jungles and the city became a desert town before it even got started. Maps feel small, even on Standard. How many tiles can a city work here? Also, how do I combat unhappiness/unhealthiness on the early game? Also, is there no rushbuying in the game? And how come I don't get gpt at the start?

Overwhelmed by the choice of leaders. Also, how do you open diplomacy screens? I R SO CONFUZZLED!!! Probably the new (old?) interface.

Report to continue once I finally get the hang of the game.

OK, where do we start...

1. This is your city's working radius. How could you miss it, it shows it every bloody time you open up the city screen (?!) Micro-managing exactly which tile your city should work is absolutely critical on anything higher than Prince.

2. You settle on jungle?! That doesn't work in any Civ game, including V. Don't settle on jungle before you have iron working! Settle on locations with good food resources, that's a priority early on, you'll see why.

3. Happiness: keep at least one unit in each city, hook up luxuries, get e religion.

4. Culture flipping - that's what culture did in IV. It also makes late-game city conquests next to impossible. I actually like culture in V more, shifting borders were a cool idea, but at times it can be really annoying.

4. Top-right corner, mouse over each option. Hardly that tricky to find. You can talk to any leader by clicking on his name in the score list bottom-right.

5. Rush-buying, or rather being able to do so from the start, is one of the things that annoy me to no end in V. You can rush-buy early on by using the slavery civic, where you whip your city's population to death. It means basically turning food into production. Granaries are very important in CIV - build them to let your cities grow to whip them again. It costs happiness though, so don't over-use it. Rush-buying with gold only comes around in the late game, if ever. Also chop down forests to rush production, but keep in mind that Mathematics increases the bonus you get from forests by 50%.

6. Of course you get gpt from the start! In CIV the gold you get you invest in research. The more gold - the more beakers. This present an interesting choice when developing each city - do you maximise food to let your city grow and work more tiles or do you build a lot of cottages to boost up your economy, and that choice is made harder even further because cottages need a lot of time to grow and really start dishing out commerce. It's one of the things that IV did better than V, where food is always better. By default when you start the game you invest 100% of your gold into research (top-left corner is the slider), but as you settle cities their maintenance will force you to lower it. Toying around with that slider is crucial particularly in the early game, if not as deep as people make it out to be. General rule of thumb - keep it at least at 70%. Lower it to 0 half a dozen turns before you construct a library in your capital.

PS: graphics are cerebral? What do you mean by that?

I had weird problem with civ 5 crash before intro. Windows crash message logs said something about, what later turned out to be gfx card driver files. I didn't realize it until I was unable to use like windows aero theme with my vista. Requires certain gfx card to enable that.

I was like whoah, I'm using 8800gt, therefore, I must have falsely installed the newest drivers and sure enough, I had to shut down, wipe out all nvidia drivers in safe mode windows, re-boot and re-install the new drivers.

worked for me. so if you know that your hardware is up to the task of running civ5, wiping out all the graphics drivers with a drive sweeper program or something is of paramount importance. Unless you have always installed new drivers in this above described fashion?

Andulias said:

OK, where do we start...

1. This is your city's working radius. How could you miss it, it shows it every bloody time you open up the city screen (?!) Micro-managing exactly which tile your city should work is absolutely critical on anything higher than Prince.
Yep, I know that. What I wanted to know was the max radius. Like the within-3-hexes bit in V.

2. You settle on jungle?! That doesn't work in any Civ game, including V. Don't settle on jungle before you have iron working! Settle on locations with good food resources, that's a priority early on, you'll see why.
Just as an experiment. There's a lot of things I need to learn here.

3. Happiness: keep at least one unit in each city, hook up luxuries, get e religion.
Should I found a religion, or should I just adopt one? Also, is it like in V where duplicates don't provide extra happiness?

4. Culture flipping - that's what culture did in IV. It also makes late-game city conquests next to impossible. I actually like culture in V more, shifting borders were a cool idea, but at times it can be really annoying.

4. Top-right corner, mouse over each option. Hardly that tricky to find. You can talk to any leader by clicking on his name in the score list bottom-right.
All I saw was that thing that displayed relationships. I wanted to know how to talk to civs. Anywya, thanks for the info.

5. Rush-buying, or rather being able to do so from the start, is one of the things that annoy me to no end in V. You can rush-buy early on by using the slavery civic, where you whip your city's population to death. It means basically turning food into production. Granaries are very important in CIV - build them to let your cities grow to whip them again. It costs happiness though, so don't over-use it. Rush-buying with gold only comes around in the late game, if ever. Also chop down forests to rush production, but keep in mind that Mathematics increases the bonus you get from forests by 50%.
That's what I did to get the Pyramids. Started out in a really forest-y area. So How do you activate the Real Ultimate Power of Slavery?

6. Of course you get gpt from the start! In CIV the gold you get you invest in research. The more gold - the more beakers. This present an interesting choice when developing each city - do you maximise food to let your city grow and work more tiles or do you build a lot of cottages to boost up your economy, and that choice is made harder even further because cottages need a lot of time to grow and really start dishing out commerce. It's one of the things that IV did better than V, where food is always better. By default when you start the game you invest 100% of your gold into research (top-left corner is the slider), but as you settle cities their maintenance will force you to lower it. Toying around with that slider is crucial particularly in the early game, if not as deep as people make it out to be. General rule of thumb - keep it at least at 70%. Lower it to 0 half a dozen turns before you construct a library in your capital.
what do you mean to lower it to zero before I construct a library?

PS: graphics are cerebral? What do you mean by that?
I meant that the game might be a bit too complicated for me

Click to expand...

Well, rolled an all-random on a small continents map. Already turn 120 as Ethiopia and I'm now looking to conquer the nearest neighbor (Sumeria.)

Starting to get the hang of it tho, so that's nice.

1. Border radius? Don't really know, pretty big actually. But the tiles you can work will always be 21.

3. Depends. If you are the founder of a religion, when you generate a GP and settle it in your holy city you get +1gpt for every city that follows your religion. This is actually a veeery big deal. On the other hand if you don't follow the religion of a civ, they will hate you. Welcome to the diplo in IV, where it all comes down to religion and religion only, with only a precious few civs not being influenced by it as much.

So, you can found your own religion and get immediately to work on missionaries to spread it as far as you can (you need open borders to convert other civ's cities). You can wait for another civ to convert you or you can found a religion, convert a civ you don't like, NOT convert to your very own religion, and wait for the other civs to destroy the one you converted. It's just as ridiculous as it sounds.

Duplicate luxuries don't give you extra happiness, no. Trade trade them in for gold or other resources. Note that unlike in V, in IV you sell resources only for gold per turn (so you can't sell your resources just before a war. How they managed to mess this up is beyond me).

4. That's you diplo screen. Right-click on any portrait to contact that leader.

5. Civics, it's a civic. You unlock it by researching Bronze Working (great logic there). Btw if you build the pyramids, always switch to Representation and try to turn your capital into a Great Scientist factory. Why your capital? Because you usually get a high-food start and when you research Civil Service IIRC you unlock the Bureaucracy civic (+50% commerce and production in your capital) Unlike in V scientists boost a city's science output by 50%, which makes them rather valuable.

6. I mean lower the slider to 0 You have the slider, you can lower it to 0 before you get a library up, generate a lot of money and then crank it up to 100%. You will surely be losing money, but you will be researching a lot (thanks to the library). Here money is research. That's about it.


I don't really think it's that much more complicated than V. Maintenance is something you really have to keep a track of early on until you get courthouses up and running (Code of Laws). Local health and happiness aren't as hard to manage as you would think, and health specifically is kind of superficial. Espionage in IV can be quite annoying, watch out for it.


Some completely random advice:

The Pyramids are epic. Pure epic, try to get them by all means.

Spam a lot of units early on to "fog bust". Barbs spawn in the fog of war, so having units everywhere means no barbs. They are a lot more dangerous in IV, annoyingly so, and will upgrade with time. You haven't seen anything until you fight barbarian riflemen They can also take cities. At higher difficulty settings they even found cities.

Initial build order is very different. Almost always start with a worker, followed by lots of warriors to fog bust. Get your first settler out when you reach size 3. Keep expanding as fast as possible without ruining your economy. Having 3-4 cities will probably lose you the game, although I do have an Emperor win with 3 cities.

You don't need to research everything. You can completely bypass Archery and hunting for instance if you don't have any resources that require hunting. Or you can ignore the religious techs if you don't plan on founding a religion. You will need those techs, but you can get them from the AI civs. Tech trading is a great feature, I don't understand why they removed it.

Early on research the techs you need to build improvements on the resources around you and then get bronze working to reveal copper and get slavery. After that it's your choice, I personally love going Mysticism-Polytheism-Priesthood, start building the Oracle and in the meantime research Writing, and with the Oracle get Code of Laws. It's a critical tech that gets you a religion, a very important building (courthouses) and its high value means you can get a lot for it out of the other civs. Oh, and don't forget Pottery, cottages are very important (generate money aka generate beakers) and Granaries are crucial to using the whip correctly.

The AI ignore Alphabet, it never gets it. As soon as you do (it enables tech trading) start trading it in for the techs you did ignore.

Monarchy gives you +1 happiness for every military unit in a city. An easy way to combat it early on, although if you have the Pyramids, Representation is all you need.

You will need at least 8 cities for national wonders. This isn't CiV, where both tall and wide empires are a viable option. You expand or you die. More cities means more production, more commerce and more research. There is no trade-off.

In the late game you will encounter war weariness. When you are at war your population will be unhappy. A lot after a certain point, a whole lot. You can combat this with civics and buildings.

Siege units not only bombard cities, they also deal damage to many units in a stack. So sacrificing several of them to weaken a big stack is a very nice tactic.

The UN can do a lot more than just win you the game. There are different resolutions, including one that bans nuclear weapons. And in vanilla if that one gets a positive vote that's it, no more nuclear weapons.

Thanks for the tips Andulias!

I have a nice stack of axes and catapults right now. Just itching to start taking cities from the global enemy. Reports to trickle again soon.

EDIT:
About Slavery: What I meant was how can I sacrifice population in order to quick build? In other words, is it a passive or an active aspect?

Syntax Error said:

Thanks for the tips Andulias!

I have a nice stack of axes and catapults right now. Just itching to start taking cities from the global enemy. Reports to trickle again soon.

EDIT:
About Slavery: What I meant was how can I sacrifice population in order to quick build? In other words, is it a passive or an active aspect?

Click to expand...

And purists claim the CiV UI is bad! At least it doesn't hide features behind tiny buttons. It hides them behind giant shiny ones that take up half your screen The whip can be found in the lower right corner of the city screen. Left from the minimap there is a panel with buttons, the top-left one, just under the one that says "draft" is the whip. The top-right one is the gold rush, you need Universal Suffrage for that one though.

Drafting is another way to "rush" production, however it works only for units and nothing else. When you draft you get one unit (which one exactly depends on your tech level) for free at the expense of 1 pop and an unhappiness boost that gets higher and higher with each drafting. There were some more restrictions to it, I think you could draft only 3 units per turn. It's only useful when someone attacks you and you have no military to defend yourself, although even then whipping might be enough to get you through. I usually play on Emperor and I am not sure I have ever drafted a single unit. It's a good example of CIV's at time needless complexity - it's there, sure, but so what?

The diplomacy, while I haven't gotten the hang of it yet, feels hollow. The full leader screens and the native language goes a long way in providing that feeling that you're actually talking to someone of great importance. We'll see what happens once I get to try it out more. What I also notice is that the AI will hate you anyway, if you expand in IV. Look at the relationships screen and you'll have a -1 with them because of "Border Disputes" when THEY settle near your cities. The ones in V just expresses their discontent earlier.

I like the Wonder Cinematics, though. That sh** needs to return.

If this ever happens to me I'll probably go rob a bank within 20 minutes and then buy two computers capable of running Civ perfectly. That way if it happens again, I've got a backup.

Syntax Error said:

The diplomacy, while I haven't gotten the hang of it yet, feels hollow. The full leader screens and the native language goes a long way in providing that feeling that you're actually talking to someone of great importance. We'll see what happens once I get to try it out more. What I also notice is that the AI will hate you anyway, if you expand in IV. Look at the relationships screen and you'll have a -1 with them because of "Border Disputes" when THEY settle near your cities. The ones in V just expresses their discontent earlier.

I like the Wonder Cinematics, though. That sh** needs to return.

Click to expand...

Diplomacy is hollow in IV?! How could you! Why I nev.... The nerve! You sir do not deserve to be called a Civfanatic!

I kid, but I find it very funny that coming off of V you say that IV has a hollow diplomacy when all the IV purists accuse V of having that exact problem. The truth is V does make you feel like you are talking to another human being a lot more than in IV, where pretty much the whole diplomacy is conducted through the trade screen. You want to ask someone to convert to your religion/civic? You want to ask someone to attack someone else? You want to raise your positive diplo modifiers? It's all done by the trade screen, everything is done by it. They could completely cut out the "Let's discuss something else" and I wouldn't even notice. I barely even declare wars through the diplo screen anyways.

IMO if they add the "Don't convert us" and "Are you planning to attack me" diplo options and fix the warmonger penalty, the diplo in V would be the superior one by a huuuuuuge margin. The one in IV does feel hollow to me too, even if the CIV fans believe otherwise.

I don't miss the world wonders cinematics really. I love art in gaming and therefore, I love the new splash screens, not to mention you will start skipping all wonder movies after the second game. I do miss the victory movies though, very much in fact. They came up with an entirely new (and not really any good) two and a half minute intro, but they couldn't be bothered to make 4 30 seconds long victory cinematics? Oh, Firaxis...

And how are you enjoying the old luck based combat system?

Still haven't completed a game yet, but I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. I don't like the combat system one bit. Too much praying to the Random Number Gawd for my tastes. Also, no Ranged Combat. Range is simulated by "First Strike", which means no matter what you do, there will always be a chance that your archers are gonna die in melee.

OK, so Forest = good, Jungle = bad. In terms of City Health, anyway. Which is good. At least they now have a distinction on what they do other than the improvements that can be built on them. Is there a production building for forests here (Lumber Mill) or do I cut them all down willy-nilly?

I think I'll go and try for a Scientific Victory now.

ALSO:
The sliders, while nice, I feel are just not that much of a feature. Sure, it affects a large part of your game (science and economy, for starters) but I feel like it's there to add micro for the sake of adding something to micro. Frankly, it has not that big of an impact since there's beaker overflow, anyway. Although now, I check it from time to time to see if I can adjust the turn time when teching. Usually when there's three to six turns left, I turn it down to the lowest it can without affecting research time for a gold boost, even if I don't know what gold is for.